If anyone likes this interface, I highly recommend Vimium on Chrome and Firefox.
Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
21–30 of 246 posts
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#22Looks good and works well. Browsing with Vimium is good enough for me though, and means I can reuse muscle memory to/from other sites.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#23This is really nice OP, love it!
Reminds me of my own Chrome extension, Refined Hacker News [1], with almost identical keybindings built into the HN interface. Neat coincidence :)
[1]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#on-items-a...
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#24Why are you blurring the previous row? Why are you disabling scrolling? These are hostile to the user.
Scrolling is disabled because this is not a website for mouse control, it's explicitly made for keyboards. You can notice this by the application not having any mouse controls at all, no links and so on. It's not user hostile if the goal is keyboard controls.
There is no reason to disable scrolling even if the primary interactions are supposed to happen with keyboard. I don’t want to remember which websites allow scrolling and which don’t.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#25Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…
I like the design - too bad that HN does not allow for you to add comment support. That would make it perfect
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#26I like it. It's strangely refreshing! I do agree the colors are a little odd. Might be the strangely part! :-)
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#27Why are you blurring the previous row? Why are you disabling scrolling? These are hostile to the user.
Scrolling is disabled because this is not a website for mouse control, it's explicitly made for keyboards. You can notice this by the application not having any mouse controls at all, no links and so on. It's not user hostile if the goal is keyboard controls.
It's an informative website. This is bad UX for an informative site. Sure it can support keyboard shortcuts for additional fast access. It will be better for power users. But disabling scrolling with mouse and touchpad is hostile and counter productive to the casual users who might be interested in the content.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#28It's great.
But.
Can you please give me an option to just select the entry as if it was a 'normal' menu instead of scrolling the whole page and keeping the 'cursor' steady at the top?
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#29Well done, works perfectly on Firefox 92 on Fedora 34. The smooth animations & responsiveness to key-presses are spot on! Can we please have Dark Mode?
Re: Show HN: Hacker News client with a twist
#30Haxplore is a little web app I created because I didn't like to click around the HN interface to read submission and discussions. I also wanted to experiment with different ways of implementing keyboard control in web apps and HN seemed like the perfect test subject. So maybe it's useful for some of you too. The most important features are: - Intuitive keyboard control - Link detection in comments with hotkeys to ope…
Intitial impression: "oookay [click] let's have a look let's see how badly broken *this* HN frontend i--ooh. Oh, okay. Wow this is nice!"
And it truly is. There's something this honestly nails.
But after using it for few moments, I was able to crystallize what I perceived was "wrong" with the design: the mechanic of combining locality with spatiality means I completely lose sight of the bigger picture. I have a really bad memory and attention span, so I depend on constantly reading cues/senses of scale from my environment. As in, they need to be constantly there. (For example, the first thing I'd do if I ever used a Mac was make the scrollbars permanently visible.)
With this UI, the immediate and global focus (the only focus) is on the comment I'm reading right now. Paradoxically, the clear intuition is that this would reduce distraction and increase focus, but (at least for me) by only presenting individual details I cannot establish and maintain orientation about how big a thread is, the structure of it (a few large mega-subthreads, or subthread islands, or hundreds of upvotes but only like 15 total comments), etc.
I tend to take full advantage of scroooooling through and cherry-picking comments to read at random. I've long dreamed of solutions that provide a rigid framework that ensure I read every comment, but I've kind of accepted that such approaches just don't work in practice; they require a tremendous amount of discipline to use (almost like grammar-proofreading a book).
A UI that has me consider every single comment as globally important ("it's the only thing on the screen at this exact moment"), both a) maxes out my attention span very quickly and b) feeds me a non-representative, breadth-first view of the discussion, because I find there's a nontrivial effort associated with needing to hit the right arrow key to expand the comments: I Have No Idea How Many Subcomments Are Hiding In There nO I aM NoT GoInG iN ThErE ThAt iS ScArY. For whatever reason (???) it's physiologically easier to just keep hitting Down instead.
This is honestly novel and interesting - and because of how well-executed this is, I can say that if you were to ever to consider tackling global orientation (I'm imagining spotlight/expose type zooming here, but I strongly suspect that would be just as disorientating as not being able to vaguely internalize the bigger picture at all), I would be very interested to see.